In color TV broadcasting standards, such as NTSC, PAL and SECAM, the transmitted signals include chrominance signals and luminance signals. In comparison to the luminance signal bandwidth, the chrominance signal bandwidth is rather narrow. The limited bandwidth of the chrominance signal produces relatively slow chrominance transitions, causing smeared color edges in the received/displayed images.
Different techniques have been used in attempts to enhance the sharpness of color transitions, such as those described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,935,806 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,920,357, known as “Color Transient Improvement” techniques. The basic steps in the Color Transient Improvement techniques are to add a “correction signal” (using a high-pass filter) to the original chrominance signals to restore the frequency components lost due to the limited bandwidth. This is followed by a post-processing to remove any undershoot and overshoot.
Typically, the “correction signal” is multiplied by a control parameter to control the overall gain. Existing techniques use a constant control parameter for an entire image, regardless of the variance in different regions of the image. However, this leads to unnatural appearance in some color edge areas of the image. As such, there has been a need to treat different regions of the image differently, and to also control the correction signal so that neither undershoot nor overshoot occurs, whereby post-processing for undershoot/overshoot removal is eliminated.